| When this book comes out, it will be 2009. Google will have just turned 10. Amazon is a blockbuster site. YouTube is a phenomenon. Facebook is the favourite daily companion of thousands of people.
But for the handful of success stories out there, there are millions and millions of companies, websites and internet experiments that are floundering in cyberspace – ineffectual, dormant or spinning around in utter confusion.
Why? Why is it that so few have really been able to successfully capture the power of the internet? Why have so many individuals and companies been unable to make sense of it all?
The answer is that most of us lack a strong strategic sense of where we want to go. We are confused by the myriad of options. We grasp at straws. We scramble around trying to make sense of fragments – tactics, tools, random ideas – rather than grasping the big picture. We desperately need to understand how our companies and our products can communicate effectively, cohesively and holistically.
But for the moment we are stuck with the fragments.
Our media world is in fragments. Many of our offline media choices don’t work as well as they used to. As for our online choices, we are unclear which ones to use or if any of them really work. Many internet tools are seductive but we don’t really ‘get’ how they can add to our bottom line. As consumers exert more control over the information they listen to and create, we aren’t totally sure where we fit in. |